Integrated Vehicle Dynamics and Control

7Integrated Vehicle Dynamics Control: Centralized Control Architecture

7.1 Principles of Integrated Vehicle Dynamics Control

Current and future motor vehicles are incorporating increasingly sophisticated chassis control systems to improve vehicle handling, stability, and comfort. These chassis control systems include vehicle stability control (VSC), active suspension system (ASS), electrical power steering (EPS), and active four-wheel steering control (4WS), etc. These control systems are generally designed by different suppliers with different technologies and components to accomplish certain control objectives or functionalities. Especially when equipped into vehicles, control systems often operate independently and thus result in a parallel vehicle control architecture. In such a parallel vehicle control architecture, inevitably there occur interaction and performance conflict among the control systems occur ineviably because the vehicle motions in the vertical, lateral, and longitudinal directions are coupled together in nature. To address the problem, an approach of using an integrated vehicle control system was proposed around the 1990s^[1]. An integrated vehicle control system is an advanced system that coordinates all the chassis control systems and components to improve the overall vehicle performance including handling stability, ride comfort, and safety, through creating synergies in the use of sensor information, hardware, and control strategies of different control ...